Cape Verde document photos online

In 2013, Cabo Verde did something almost no nation has dared: it formally told the United Nations to stop translating its name. The Atlantic archipelago's permanent mission asked that the short form "Cabo Verde" be used unchanged in every official UN language - no more "Cape Verde," "Cap-Vert" or "Kap Verde" on documents - because, as its culture minister put it, constant translation was simply too much trouble. It is a rare case of a country re-engineering its own identity at the source: the name printed on passports, treaties and registries worldwide is now meant to read the same in any tongue.

• Name policy Since 24 October 2013, the country's official short name is "Cabo Verde" in all UN languages, with an explicit instruction that it must not be translated.
• Passport power The Cabo Verdean passport ranks around 70th on the Henley Passport Index, giving holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 63 destinations.
• Diaspora citizenship Citizenship by descent reaches astonishingly far: even great-great-grandchildren of Cabo Verdeans born abroad can claim it, and more Cabo Verdeans live overseas than in the islands themselves.
• Voting abroad The diaspora is so central that six of the National Assembly's seats are reserved for citizens living abroad - two each for the Americas, Africa, and Europe-plus-rest-of-world.
• Currency symbol The escudo uses the cifrao ($) as its decimal point, so 20 escudos is written "20$00" and 1,000 escudos as "1.000$00" - the dollar-like sign sits in the middle of the number, not before it.
• Euro peg The Cabo Verdean escudo has been locked to the euro at a fixed 1 EUR = 110.265 CVE, a peg inherited from a 1998 agreement with Portugal even though the country is not in the eurozone.
• First in the tropics Settled by the Portuguese in 1462, Cidade Velha (then Ribeira Grande) became the first permanent European settlement in the tropics - on islands that had been completely uninhabited before 1456.
• World heritage sound Morna, the soulful national music made famous worldwide by "barefoot diva" Cesaria Evora, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list on 11 December 2019.
• Island of fire Pico do Fogo, the archipelago's 2,829 m active volcano, erupted in 2014-15 for the first time in 19 years, burying two villages inside its own caldera and causing about 5 billion escudos in damage.